Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile. Published by Atlantic. $28
KEY POINTS:
Hollywood did not have to work very hard to turn George Crile's book Charlie Wilson's War into a movie vehicle for Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks.
The plot already read as if it came from the overexcited imagination of a screenwriter, involving a conspiracy to fund a huge secret American military operation almost entirely outside political control and public knowledge.
The cast is rich to the point of excess. There is the larger-than-life congressman given to high profile scandal involving sex, drugs and drink. There are Texan socialites, spies, saboteurs, world statesmen, untamed warriors, lethal gadget inventors and political operators of devious genius and dubious ethics.
The setting switches from the romantic wild mountains of Afghanistan to the fleshpots of Las Vegas and the corridors of power in Washington. And then there is the parade of women including a Playboy cover girl, beauty queens and would-be movie stars rejoicing in names like Snowflake and Sweetums.
If only half of this was true there would be more than enough for any blockbuster.
And it is hard to doubt that much more than half is true.
Crile, a former CBS television programme-maker, was one of that breed of American investigative journalist who gives the trade a good name. His book rests on 15 years of work and countless hours of interviews and research. The interpretation of his discoveries may be - and will be - challenged but the facts are beyond serious dispute.
In exhaustive detail Crile chronicles how in the latter stages of the Cold War Charlie Wilson, a dissolute, colourful but under-achieving Texas congressman, got together with Gust Avrakotos, an unorthodox CIA agent with a chip on his shoulder. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan they clandestinely engineered an operation that, working through Pakistan, became the United States' biggest proxy war, consuming billions of dollars in providing an ever bigger and more sophisticated flow of weaponry to the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Wilson's war was unique not only in its scale but in its result. Unlike many of the CIA's adventures they backed the winning horse or, more accurately, the winning mules who ferried in the supplies.
The Soviet Union did withdraw from Afghanistan.
The cable sent from the CIA in Islamabad when the last Soviet troops crossed the border out of Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, read "we won".
The decision by Moscow to stage an ultimately unsuccessful occupation that cost thousands of lives and a huge amount of prestige was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire. For Wilson and Avrakotos that was enough.
But for a conflict that was seen by the mujahideen as religious the American pair were unlikely holy warriors.
Wilson - played by Hanks in the movie - was a political basket case, a Democrat who had served in the Texas legislature and the Congress for more than 15 years and had accumulated only debts and scandal. He had a film star's presence, tall, handsome and with a taste for cowboy style but had no political achievements to his name. Typical was his involvement in June 1980 in an episode while visiting Las Vegas that included hot tubs in the Fantasy Suite at Caesar's Palace, showgirls, a beauty queen and cocaine.
But Wilson had a Teflon ability to shake off the scandals and his backers, both voters and political allies, gave him an extraordinary amount of licence.
And it was one of his backers, Joanne Herring, a Texas socialite, (played by Roberts in the film), who introduced Wilson to the Afghanistan cause - a development which as Crile says, ended up with the CIA having "a billion dollars a year to kill Russian soldiers".
Herring is another figure who seems to have strayed in from a daytime soap. She was a glamorous blond socialite with an extreme anti-communist background, with her buxom friend Sandra "Buckets" Hovas who became the Baroness di Portanova and was another player influential in getting Wilson embroiled in the Afghan cause.
Wilson had realised early in his political career that taking an interest in foreign affairs meant you could manoeuvre your way on to funded junkets that involved travel, the best hotels, meeting influential people and the chance to take your girlfriends along and impress them with a lavish lifestyle. His earlier infatuation with a foreign cause involved being a fervent Israeli supporter.
Wilson also flirted with the appalling Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza but saw the warning signs in time.
But when Herring introduced Wilson to the mujahideen he found his true cause, one that gave him influence and the chance, despite all his personal flakiness, to occupy the patriotic moral high ground.
Despite the freeloading and self-interest, Crile suggests Wilson had genuine noble motives - he was from childhood a champion of the underdog and worshipped the idea of Winston Churchill rallying Britain in the darkest hours of World War II.
He had a military background and idealised the Afghans as noble, fearless warriors.
The fierce and unrelenting nature of the tribesmen also struck a chord in the CIA man, Avrakotos, with whom Wilson developed a remarkable alliance. This Greek-American from the tough steel town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, was a bloody-minded, foul-mouthed operator who learned his trade in the dirty world of CIA operations in the Greece of the colonels. Explaining his relationship with Wilson, Avrakotos said "what brought us together was chasing pussy and killing communists".
It's hard to disagree with one of Avrakotos' superiors in the CIA who said "I had known Gust for years and never liked him. He's just a horrible man." But he revelled in that attitude and in his self-appointed role as the man who did the jobs that other CIA men found too dirty.
The talents of Wilson and Avrakotos turned out to be an unstoppable combination.
The blue-collar Greek delighted in outsmarting his "cake-eating superiors" and he was determined to turn what had been limited support into all-out backing for a shooting war, channelled through Pakistan and with huge additional aid from Saudi Arabia.
For all the ridiculous behaviour of Wilson - and Crile suggests he was well aware of the buffoonish figure he occasionally cut - the Texan was a wonderful political operator.
He accumulated favours and when the time was right called them in and the budget allocations to the CIA operations grew so fast that it startled the CIA top echelons themselves.
The art of doing deals is not unique to American politics but the congressional committee system does seem to offer a particularly rewarding playground to the skilful.
Wilson also established a unique personal relationship with Pakistan's dictator President Zia.
What is certain is that as the war went on, the supply of American funded weaponry across the borders from Pakistan became a torrent. Eventually the Russians did go and Wilson was able to snatch a preposterous photo opportunity sitting on a white horse surrounded by gun-wielding tribesmen.
This account is a fascinating story, skilfully told, but it raises bigger issues. There are questions about the workings of a system in which a skilful political operator and a rebel intelligence officer can set up a train of events that have never really been sanctioned or discussed.
Both the Soviets and the Americans are still obviously willing and able to fight proxy wars and as events this week have shown, Afghanistan is still suffering.
Crile's obvious affection for Wilson and Avrakotos did not blind him to what he deals with in his epilogue called "Unintended Consequences".
Although the CIA operation in Afghanistan could be claimed as a victory, America was given no credit. To many in the Islamic world the expulsion of the Soviets was the inevitable outcome of a holy war.
The flood of money to the mujahideen led to the rule of the Taleban, the entrenchment of extremism and that line leads to 9/11 and the global threat of terrorism.
Charlie Wilson's war has left a dreadful legacy.
* The movie opens on January 24.
